Thursday, October 4, 2012

The Subtext of the First Romney-Obama Debate

The consensus of pundit reaction to the first debate between Romney and
Obama is that Romney won on “style” if not also on substance. Liberal pundits
point out that Romney lied over and over again in the debate, flip-flopping or
shaking his Etch A Sketch; these pundits concede, though, that while the
Republican nominee was smug, condescending, and arrogant, smirking and
squinting at Obama, Romney showed much more enthusiasm. Conservative pundits gloat
that Romney stood toe-to-toe with the President and delivered the policy specifics
that Americans allegedly requested. Obama was “professorial,” making solid,
well-worn points against Romney, but with atrocious delivery: the President didn’t dumb-down or speak in punchy, pithy sound bites, and he kept looking
down while writing notes instead of maintaining eye contact with his opponent, as though he were physically
submitting to Romney; moreover, Obama missed all sorts of opportunities to go
after Romney, to vanquish his unworthy foe, to speak the truth about the abysmal
state of the Republican Party.

Arguably, Romney had more to lose so he came better prepared
in addition to having more recent debating experience--albeit with the clown
car of the other Republican contenders, like Bachmann, Cain, and Perry. Obama
may have been distracted by pressing political matters like Syria or Iran, he may not like debates, and he may have been coached to sit on his lead in the polls and thus to not take any chances.
But as psychologist, Drew Westen, pointed out a year ago, Obama’s lack of
passion throughout his time in office has been not just disappointing but
baffling to liberals. While still a senator, Obama campaigned for the
presidency with such fervor that Democrats thought he was the anti-Bush Messiah.
In reality, it turns out that anyone with even minimal acting ability can read
a teleprompter with a fiery tone; plus, most of Obama’s memorable campaign rhetoric--“Change!”
and “Yes, we can!”--was amorphous. Obama wanted to restore bipartisan sanity to
Washington and was rewarded with the descent of the GOP into an apocalyptic cult that brooked no compromise with the Democrats, and was bent on
annihilating liberalism and ensuring that Obama was a one-term President.
Republicans would vote even against legislation they themselves proposed, to
deny Obama a legislative victory.

The biggest lie Republicans now tell is that such
vitriolic hatred of liberals is justified by Obama’s socialist extremism. Republican
leaders have learned from cognitive science, as well as from the New Testament,
that the best way to sell your policies is to couch them in opposition to a
mortal enemy, to activate your minions’ fight-or-flight instinct. When
Republicans distort Democratic policies, pretending that American liberals
want to impose a communist dictatorship on the US, outlawing capitalism, and so forth,
they not only demonize their opponents but reinforce an equally stark definition
of what it means to be a Republican. This is the underlying reason why Romney
was so energized in his first debate with Obama. Even though Romney is
personally a moderate, pragmatic centrist, which is to say a nihilistic,
Machiavellian sociopath who will say anything to get elected, he’s immersed in
a miasma of Republican myths, in the so-called Fox News bubble, which inspires him
to pretend that Obama has a diabolic plan to steal from hard-working,
job-creating capitalists to further spoil the 47% of do-nothing moochers.

The reason this is a lie is that Obama’s actual ideology is
just as much an empty shell as Romney’s. Both men know that political ideology
in the US is a sideshow, since the economic power of the wealthy elites dictates
the political agenda and holds the country hostage. For example, this is what
it means for Wall Street banks to be “too big to fail.” As the radical pundit Max
Keiser says, the American plutocrats function as parasites and financial
terrorists, literally holding the power to sink the American economy unless the
government swears fealty to their plan of establishing a neo-feudal social order. As
I’ve explained elsewhere, Obama is a postmodern and thus a disenchanted
liberal. He’s too smart to believe in anything; certainly, his liberal
Christianity is vacuous, consisting of feel-good New Age slogans that can’t
withstand three seconds of rational examination. (See also Liberalism and Libertarianism.) And this is why, as Westen
says,

When he wants to be, the president is a brilliant and moving
speaker, but his stories virtually always lack one element: the villain who
caused the problem, who is always left out, described in impersonal terms, or
described in passive voice, as if the cause of others’ misery has no agency and
hence no culpability.

Obama can’t even directly criticize Republicans, let alone demonize them, because far from
being a zealous socialist he personally stands for absolutely nothing--and this,
despite the fact that he’s confronted with Republicans who are actually more
or less evil! Perhaps mesmerized by
the audacity of that evil, Obama retreats to relativist, multicultural, post-Enlightenment
liberalism, which means his principles dissipate as soon as they’re called to action.

Is “evil” too strong a word” for the Republicans’ social
Darwinism and Ayn Randian egoism? Of course not. As became clear when Wolf
Blitzer asked Ron Paul in a debate whether libertarianism implies that an
uninsured sick person should be left to die if he can’t afford health care, and
Paul was forced to backtrack and obfuscate when a thrall from the audience
cried out in ecstasy, “Yeah!”, the selfishness at the root of economic
conservatism is the same that motivates all wicked acts. Amoral social Darwinism,
according to which the social safety net should be torn away to preserve the freedom
to profit from the application of vices in a beastly competition, is the same
worldview that rationalizes blue collar forms of evil, such as first degree murder.
As horrible as murder is, the white collar sabotaging of progressive government
institutions so that they’re helpless to prevent the re-naturalization of the social
order, which is to say the reconstitution of jungle-style dominance hierarchies, is no less evil for being a much less direct form of violence. Callous
henchmen get their hands dirty while a heartless mastermind pushes buttons in his underground lair, but both are forms of wickedness.

And even after being humiliated by Republicans, who won back
the House, obstructed the Democrats despite their holy mandate for change after
eight execrable years of George W. Bush, and stooped to exploiting
American racism to paint Obama as un-American, Obama sleepwalks through his
first chance to personally slay the dragon. Face to face with the chief
representative of the toxic Republican Party, Obama still shies away from drama,
from conflict. For numerous reasons, Obama can’t afford to tell Americans the truth
about the decline of their political system, but one such reason which isn’t
widely known is that Obama has no philosophical grounds to reverse that decline
or to condemn the juggernaut that’s chiefly to blame for the US implosion. Even if Obama wanted to be cautious, to protect his lead by avoiding gaffes, a true-believing liberal would have been unable to stop himself from eviscerating the leader of the odious Republicans, were he given Obama's chance.

Like King Denethor from Lord of the Rings, who succumbs to
terror after peaking over his parapets and beholding the vastness of evil
Sauron’s might in the form of his horde of monsters and demons that stretches
to the horizon, Obama’s hesitance speaks to a larger problem: the bankruptcy of postmodern liberalism. There is currently no viable
philosophy or religion to resist the conservative myths that favour a reconstituting of what Lewis Mumford calls the megamachine, which I interpret
as the natural state of oligarchy. Ancient religions are hopelessly
anachronistic if not also compromised, while Scientism (secular humanism) eliminates
the whole field of normative inquiry as unsusceptible to scientific solutions. I
submit, though, that a prerequisite of a more worthy alternative is what I call
existential cosmicism.

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In this blog you'll find my philosophical rants within the undead god. What on earth is the "undead god," you ask, and why do I rant within it? Read on and find out or just look at how the planet and all of nature mindlessly evolve, setting the stage for our existential predicament. In the big picture, who I am doesn't matter at all and when I write here I write mostly with the big picture in mind. But if you're curious about some of my interests, see my blogger profile.